Novo has struck a 1.165 billion euro ($1.33 billion) deal to combine Nanexa’s long-acting injectable drug delivery platform with the Big Pharma's obesity and Type 2 diabetes drugs.
The agreement gives Novo an exclusive global license to use Nanexa’s technology with certain peptides in indications such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases. Nanexa’s technology, PharmaShell, applies an inorganic coating to drug particles. Coated particles form depots at the injection site and, as the coating dissolves, drug particles enter the bloodstream.
Novo has identified the technology as a good fit for plans to differentiate its medicines by extending their dosing windows. Nanexa has given the Danish drugmaker rights to apply the PharmaShell platform to up to five programs. Novo is targeting monthly and quarterly administration frequencies.
The upfront payment and the development and regulatory milestones are worth up to 615 million euros ($700 million). The remaining 550 million euros ($626 million) is tied to sales milestones. Neither Novo nor Nanexa has disclosed the size of the upfront payment. Last year, Moderna paid Nanexa $3 million to enter into a collaboration that could be worth up to $500 million in total.
News of the deal comes days after Novo discussed its current crop of long-acting injectables. Speaking at a Capital Markets Day, at which Novo struggled to appease investors, the pharma's chief scientific officer Martin Holst Lange, M.D., Ph.D., set out plans to take a once-monthly GLP-1 drug into the clinic this year.
“Over the next one year, I would say, we actually expect to see at least three or four first human doses with once-monthly GLP-1, because I cannot promise you, obviously, that the first will be the best,” Lange said. “We need to fully understand the half-life of this. You’ve seen half-lives from others. They’re not necessarily lending themselves fully to a once-monthly therapy.”
Pfizer reported data on its once-monthly GLP-1 drug candidate in February. The drugmaker acquired the molecule in its $10 billion takeover of Metsera, a biotech that Novo also tried to buy. Asked in June about Pfizer’s results, Lange said, “I’m not sure that the data were as compelling as we had hoped for, in particular, on the tolerability side, but also a little bit on the efficacy side.”
“They really had to think about their titration because the once-monthly tolerability was not as attractive as I would have expected,” Lange said. “To give patients something in a once-monthly setting, the proposition has to be that it is a very attractive tolerability profile.”
Eli Lilly, the GLP-1 leader, is also working on long-acting molecules. The drugmaker inked an $870 million deal to access Camurus’ technology last year. Lilly extended the pact to cover amylin receptor agonists in June.